NEWS AROUND US

Discord acquires augmented reality startup Ubiquity6

After raising tens of millions from investors and executing a pretty substantial pivot earlier this year, augmented reality startup Ubiquity6 and its team have been acquired by gaming chat app giant Discord.

The ambitious AR startup had raised $37.5 million from a series of top investors including Benchmark, First Round, Kleiner Perkins and Google’s Gradient Ventures who were betting on its vision of building a consumer-facing platform for hosting augmented reality content. Its most recent publicly disclosed financing was a $27 million Series B in October of 2018.

Terms of the Discord acquisition weren’t disclosed, though in recent months the startup seemed to abandon most of the products it had spent its first several years building, suggesting that Ubiquity6 had been having some issues finding wide audiences for its products.

Ubiquity6 nabs $10.5 million from top investors to build a deeper augmented reality

Launching back in 2017, Ubiquity6 hoped to build an app that would be the central way mobile phone users would browse augmented reality content. In late 2019, the startup launched a product called Displayland, which aimed to gamify the process of 3D scanning physical environments with a smartphone’s camera.

The company’s efforts to find mass adoption were hampered by a mobile AR market which has largely failed to gain any momentum in recent years despite hefty investment from tech giants including Apple and Google.

In early 2020, CEO Anjney Midha told TechCrunch that the startup had some 65 employees.

In recent months, Ubiquity6 had executed a pretty drastic pivot, leaving augmented reality completely behind in favor of building out a desktop platform that allowed users to play simple online party games together remotely. The beta platform, called Backyard, was designed for pandemic era habits that seem to be on the decline as the US springs back into action. Backyard was discontinued this week as part of the acquisition announcement.

In a Medium post announcing the acquisition, Midha seems to downplay any expectations that Ubiquity6’s augmented reality technology will be living on inside Discord.

“Our mission at Ubiquity6 has always been to unlock new ways for people to connect through shared experiences,” Midha wrote. “Joining Discord today allows us to accelerate that mission — Ubiquity6’s team, Backyard product and multiplayer technology will be integrated into Discord.”

Ubiquity6 launches a studio editor built for the real world

from TechCrunch
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Christians Being Scammed By Fake Health Insurance

These health care sharing ministries are outright scams, but it's not likely the people being sucked in are watching John Oliver, so maybe our elected officials should do the heavy lifting? Ha ha, just kidding! Via Deadline:

John Oliver is back with another fake gimmick — this time, a church.

After a lengthy segment in which Oliver detailed Health Care Sharing Ministries (HCSM), non-profits with common religious beliefs that share medical bills, and how they regularly exploit morality clauses to deny coverage to queer people, the obese or even people who smoke or drink, the host decided to bring the hammer down on the hypocritical organizations by starting one of his own.

Oliver founded Our Lady Of Perpetual Exemption, a bogus church, in 2015 to expose U.S. tax laws that allow preachers to get away with saying almost anything on television. In the bit, Oliver and his fake wife, played by Rachel Dratch, promised viewers that great things would happen to them if they sent them real money.

These scams are not actually health insurance. All they do is vacuum up money from vulnerable people. If you know any religious types who seem susceptible to this sort of thing, at least pass along this information.